Media streaming is becoming an increasingly popular way of delivering television, movies and other media content to viewers. Media streams are typically point-to-point transmissions of digitized content that can be sent over the Internet or a similar network. Media streaming is often used to facilitate video on demand (VOD) services, local storage and/or remote storage digital video recorder (LSDVR and/or RSDVR) services, Internet Protocol television (IPTV) services, placeshifted media viewing and/or any number of other convenient services. Generally, the media stream is played back for the viewer in real time as the stream continues to be delivered to the player.
Often, media content is encoded into multiple sets of “streamlets” or other smaller segment files that can be individually requested and adaptively delivered to a particular client device. As changes in network bandwidth or other factors occur, the client device is able to react to the changes by requesting future segments that are encoded with different parameters (e.g., a higher or lower bit rate) for increased or decreased quality, as desired. Adaptive media streaming typically relies upon the media player client to control much of the streaming process. That is, the media player client, rather than the server, typically determines the next segment of the stream that will be requested and delivered to the player. Several examples of adaptive streaming systems, devices and techniques are described in US Patent Publication No. 2008/0195743, which is incorporated herein by reference as one example of an adaptive media streaming system.
Various server systems and processes have been developed to store and retrieve encoded video data DVRs, video servers and/or the like. US Patent Publication 2014/0165116, for example, is incorporated herein by reference to show examples of file systems and associated processes that can be used with RSDVR systems. There is still a desire, however, to improve the performance of RSDVRs, LSDVRs and other data storage intensive applications.
It is therefore desirable to create systems, devices and processes that allow the efficient storage and retrieval of video content in an LSDVR, RSDVR, video server or the like. These and other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background section.